A Beautiful Update

the latest dispatch from Beautiful, Portugal

Today it is fall pretending to still be summer with the temp reaching eighty, briefly… but I am not fooled, the sky is an autumnal shade of blue, anyone can see it.

Winter seems far off…but soon enough these fall days will get shorter and grow colder. It rained two days last week, and is expected to rain again this week. Before you know it, the trees will shake drifts of leaves down onto the calcadas. The rains will come, driving our projects around the property indoors.

Today Tiago and crew are finishing painting the cottage, and will later repair and paint the tiles of the palaceta roof. A lot is happening all at once, I will list the items in much the same way they fly around in my head:

• Today while taking the little orphan hens out for their romp we heard a buzzing and looked around and then the h said, It’s a drone. Sure enough there it was hovering above us. We - the h, me, Jake - all stared up at it, and it sort of jerked around and tried to fly away but looked wobbly. The hen babies crowded into the low branches of a shrub. The h sprinted off to the upper terraces while I stayed behind and fondly watched the little hens venture out and then decimate the rest of our sunflowers. Our visiting friends think we are a bit cuckoo for these hens. We’re okay with that.

  • the h returned with a photo of the drone ID on his phone. What happened? I asked. It was a kid, maybe 20, sitting on the wall across from our property, the h said. He saw me carrying his drone and came right over and was all I’m sorry, sir. He spoke English? I asked, Yep, the h said. I told him, never again. He said it was an accident and was very respectful and scared, and I gave him his drone back.

• On Thursday friends arrived for a short visit. They were at the tail end of a Mediterranean cruise, and spent a few rainy days in Lisbon before heading to the fazenda. How nice it was to see them driving up our driveway like old times - we’ve been friends since my corporate days back in Texas, and lived just a few blocks apart, a quick scooter trip away. They are doing a home renovation project to a 100+ year old house as well, and like us have been at it for more than a year, but mostly caught in the early pre-work stages. How nice to make dinner together, Mark a maestro at the grill, perfectly cooking dorado and shrimp, while Tricia made a beautiful salad with the rest of the tomatoes from the garden. Alberto contributed bread from his baker friend and we drank sangria made with grapes and gingas from his orchard.

  

• We purchased a bed to arrive well in advance of our friends and 75% of it did…but the 25% needed to actually sleep in it didn’t arrive until the day after our friends did. So one friend got the fold out couch in the quinta, two got the new mattress that went onto the floor, also in the quinta, while and the h and I took the fold out couch in the palaceta. Jake didn’t want to go over, but we made him and he grumpily followed us, his dragging pace clearly indicating he had thought the days of trudging back and forth between houses by headlamp at all hours were behind us. It was odd sleeping in the palaceta again, after moving out a month ago. It was dark and quiet, the baby hens in their room never made a sound. The jagged hole in the ceiling spooked me, like it was bleeding blackness. I shut my eyes and tried to ignore it. The h went right to sleep.

• I had an exciting moment when we realized we were out of propane and butane, necessitating someone call the gas man to come and swap out our tanks. I had the number; last time Alberto made the call, and the guy arrived in less than an hour. Have Tiago call, the h said. But I made myself do it, and HE UNDERSTOOD ME!!! I wasn’t totally sure, though, until he pulled up in the driveway an hour later.

• We took our guests on a tour of the property and the village, took a long hike at the Sintra municipal park where Jake waded into the creek three different times and bounded out to show he was still full of vim and vigor, dammit, even if his back legs are a little stiff now and again. He knew our friends from visits to San Francisco so has been overjoyed bouncing between guest beds during their visit.

• Alberto brought us a round loaf of cornbread and a jar of ginga, heavy on the cherries because I once said they were the best part. He always brings gifts like this when we have guests. The cornbread was delicious with honey and homemade fig-ginger-lime jam.

• When the rest of the bed arrived our guest put it together and now the three bedroom garden apartment actually has a room with a bed. When it came time to turn in the h and I headed back to the palaceta but our friends urged us to bunk with them in the third bedroom of the garden apartment. Now, the garden apartment is pretty small, three bedrooms and a little kitchen off one long rectangular common room; almost anywhere you sit in the middle of the apartment you can see into most or all of the other rooms when the doors are open. I thought five adults and a 75 lb chocolate Labrador would feel crowded, but also wanted to wake up in the house that had the new the espresso maker, not to mention not sleep under a yawning black hole out of a Guillermo del Toro movie. So we brought the mattress from the pull-out couch in the palaceta over to the quinta, carrying it folded between us like a mattress taco stuffed with with sheets and pillows. We put the yoga mats and the gym mat under the mattress and called it good, and it was. Enough.

  

• When the guests leave early tomorrow I will spend the morning doing laundry and chicken and dog and horta chores, and then I will, for the first time since moving to Portugal - a period of nineteen months - go to bed in my house in a bed that is not a fold-out couch but a bed made to be nothing else but a bed. It has a proper headboard and when it is bedtime I will sit up and read in bed by the light of the lamp Alberto made for us out of a Beirao licor bottle with a little black lampshade. Beirao is a traditional beverage of Portugal, like the Italian digestives but this one made of Portuguese oranges with spices.

• Tomorrow is paint the cottage day. It is primed white and awaits the Queluz blue color we are trying out for the window and door frames. We can’t decide on a front door color, a big deal as it will be the most viewed item on the property given its location at the top of the cottage steps that lead the eye upward to stop right at the door. It’s looking quite transformed these days, the cottage is.

  

  

• When Tiago saw that we had guests, he hit the pause button on the work on the cottage and zoomed around the property raking and blowing and scraping so that when we emerged from the garden apartment with everyone wanting a tour after settling into their rooms, there were no leaves on the courtyards or on Olive Tree Lane, no weeds in the calcadas, the water hoses coiled neatly, the carport neatened up, even the flowerpots on the steps of the garden apartment were neatly arranged. I felt almost teary as I saw each new evidence of his thoughtfulness. He is such a stellar human being. As we toured around I was so proud at how nice everything looked.

• I have always heard the saying good things come in threes but never scientifically tested it. Last Friday, the wifi company finally finished the wifi install and now, after two months of missed connections and rescheduled appointments we have 10G, no more running wifi off a hotspot from my smart phone. The second good thing was the rest of the IKEA bed arriving in time for my guests to actually make use of it. The third good thing occurred at the very end of the day Friday - a postcard left by our postal service in our mailbox, addressed to me, letting me know a package from AIMAA (which stands for the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) the organization responsible for mailing (drumroll please) RESIDENCE CARDS. I walked over on Saturday only to find the post office was closed. This morning I returned, exchanged my postcard for a slim envelope with the telltale square shape of a residence card within. I danced a little jig with Jake outside the post office, his booming barks making everyone at the bus stop look over. So yeah, it’s official, good things do indeed come in threes.

• The yellow chair is still in the window and the price has been reduced by the princely sum of 4 euros - from 179 euro to 175 euro. All conditions have been met for purchase without guilt. It’s supposed to rain this week and the h is going out of town for a few days for a meeting. Can I get the chair home on my own, dry? Stay tuned.

• Look at my hen babies taking a dirt bath in slowmo. I am thinking of starting The Chicken Channel, a substack just about the flock. I can’t tell if chickens really are unexpectedly interesting or is it just me.